Edward Bond

“The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.”

“If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.”

“When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.”

“Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.”

“Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.”

“The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.”

“You have to learn the language of Hamlet.”

“I think there is no world without theatre.”

“[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.”

“At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.”

“In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice.”

“WANG. We live in a time of great change. It is easy to find monsters- and as easy to find heroes. To judge rightly what is good - to choose between good and evil - that is all that is to be human.”

“The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.”

“In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.”

“If a god had made the world, might world always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world - out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile...”

“What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.”

“Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.”

“What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.”

“You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.”

“The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.”